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"That's a non-answer, which is its own kind of answer." Dresh grinned, easy as ever. He'd never once been troubled by a problem he couldn't fix with his hands, and Kavren had envied him that since they were nine. "The Dowager wants her gone. Everybody knows it. You're the eyes. Point them where you're told and don't think too hard about the rest. Free advice."

"You remember the winter they brought me in?"

Dresh's grin softened. "Third of the shortfall. You were half a Drog's meal and all elbows. Captains bet on how long you'd last."

"She fed me at her own table for a month. Gave me a name that meant something." Kavren turned the meat in his fingers and didn't eat it. "I've never handed her a report that wasn't the whole truth. Twenty years."

The ease went out of Dresh's face. What replaced it was the look of a man who'd just heard a friend say a thing that couldn't be unsaid. "Then don't start now," he said quietly. "Whatever you think you're seeing. You're not the first soldier sent to watch somebody and started watching them the wrong way. You're just the first one I like. Keep your ledger clean, Kavren. The Dowager forgives a lot. A liar in her own house isn't on the list."

Kavren finished his meal and said nothing, and Dresh let it go. That was the other thing you learned in a barracks, when to let a thing lie. But the words stayed with him after the table cleared. Keep your ledger clean. He was already keeping two.

*** Diana ***

The dying sun reached them in the deep corridors before it ever touched the sky.

She'd wanted to see the lower stores herself, trusting her own eyes over a steward's inventory, and Kavren took her down a route he'd walked a hundred times as a boy. He didn't like the deep corridors that week. The engineers had been muttering about thermal stress, about the failing sun heating the crust unevenly and setting old stone shifting in ways it hadn't shifted in generations. A soldier learned to trust the muttering of engineers the way he trusted the quiet before a Drog charge.

The ceiling came down without warning, the way the worst things do.

Diana heard the crack a half-second after he did, and in that half-second his body did what twenty years had built it to do. He didn't decide to move. He was already moving, one arm around her, his weight turning her out from under the fall, his wing snapping open over them both as a slab the size of a sleeping platform hit the floor where she'd been standing. The stone struck his shoulder and his spread wing. The noise filled the corridor. Then it was done, and she was inside the curve of his wing with his heart loud under her ear.

Neither of them moved for a moment longer than the danger needed.

"Are you hurt?" His voice came out rough.

"No." Hers wasn't steady, and her voice was always steady. They both heard the crack in it. "Your shoulder took that. And your wing."

"They've taken worse." He made himself open the wing. He made himself set the distance back between them, one careful degree at a time, like a man defusing a charge that would go off if he moved too fast. "The route's no good. We go back the way we came."

She stepped out of the curve of his wing and looked at the fallen slab, then at him, at the dust graying his dark scales and the shoulder that was going to bruise. Something crossed her face that wasn't the consort and wasn't calculation and wasn't anything he could name.

"You put yourself under a ceiling for me," she said.

"That's the assignment."

"No, it isn't." She said it quietly, with the flat certainty she saved for the truest things. "The assignment is to watch me. Getting under falling rock is a different job, and you did it before you had time to pick which one you were doing." She held his eyes a second longer than she needed to, then let it go. "Take me back up. And have that shoulder looked at, or I'll do it myself. I promise you'd rather the healers."

He took her up. His shoulder ached the whole way, and the ache was nothing next to the fact that he could still feel exactly where she'd been.

He should have reported it. A ceiling came down on the consort and her guard put his body under it. That was precisely the kind of detail the Dowager wanted, the kind that told her how close the human let her protection stand. He didn't write it. He sat in the barracks with the ache spreading over his shoulder and understood that this had stopped being about what belonged in a report. He was leaving it out because it mattered. Some part of him had decided, without asking the rest of him, that what happened in that corridor belonged to the two of them and nobody else.

CHAPTER 5

*** KAVREN ***

Diana's rounds took a whole day, and Kavren walked every step of them. By the end he'd been handed a map of a woman the court had never bothered to read.

She went to the settlement liaisons first, in the cold hall where the perimeter communities came to fight for their share. Kavren expected the consort's polish and got something better. She knew their names. She knew their numbers. There was a steward near the back who hadn't said a word, from a settlement too far out to be worth a hawk's notice, and Diana called on him before he'd worked up the nerve to ask for anything.

His settlement had been left off the redistribution list. One missing line in a clerk's column, and four hundred people looking at a winter on half rations.

"Your settlement was left off," Diana told him, out loud, in front of the whole room. "That's this office's mistake, not yours, and it's fixed as of right now."

The steward opened his mouth and closed it again. "We were told there wasn't grain to spare, my lady."

"You were told wrong. There's grain. It went to a column that didn't need it." She was already making the note. "Get your count to my office by dark. I'll have it moving by morning."

The steward looked like a man who'd braced for a fight and been handed a meal.